Monday, September 03, 2012

What do Republicans want?

During an e-mail exchange a few months ago, someone I know who doesn't consider himself either a partisan Democrat or a partisan Republican, but instead a centrist moderate and a supporter American traditions of constitutional government, raised the following question in genuine perplexity:

Much of the Republican rhetoric seems quite populist and
unappealing to me. I wonder what they really want, and I see no way of
finding out--except waiting for the campaign to proceed. The political
aims seem to swallow the policy agenda. [....]

Well, there are long answers and short answers to that question. For a cogent and illuminating short answer, it is hard to improve on this pithy formulation by Mark Kleiman (quoted here by Jonathan Zasloff, a fellow-blogger
at "The Reality-Based Community"):

As Mark has noted, the current GOP is a coalition between those who want
to repeal the New Deal and those who want to repeal the Enlightenment.
Both impulses seek to send this country back a long, long way.

Of course, that doesn't apply, or apply in full, to every individual Republican ( I happen to know a few Republicans myself who wouldn't fit this description); and one could even name some Republican political figures to whom it applies only with qualifications. American political parties are sprawling, complicated entities with lots of different tendencies and internal tensions.

However, Kleiman's formulation does cut to the heart of the matter, since it nicely captures the central driving agendas which, in combination, now overwhelmingly dominate the national Republican coalition. Other tendencies do exist in the Republican Party, and I wish them well, but at present they're marginalized or inconsequential (or cosmetic).

We have to hope that this situation, which represents the culmination of three decades of fairly steady right-wing radicalization in one of our two major parties, proves to be a transitory condition.

Links to this post:

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and is currently a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)